Outrage

Re "Shooting of teenage activist unleashes outrage in Pakistan," Oct. 11 Where are the riots in the rest of the Muslim world? Where are the fatwas against the shooter and Taliban leaders from Muslims throughout the world? Isn't the subhuman shooting of an innocent child, and its justification as an Islamic religious act by Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan, a much bigger insult to the religion and its prophet than a lame movie trailer posted on YouTube? Alan Segal San Diego ALSO: Letters: U.S. law abroad Letters: A less religious America Letters: Abortion back in the campaign

WASHINGTON - It's not difficult to get a bonus if you work for the Internal Revenue Service - even if you haven't paid your own taxes. The IRS handed out a total of nearly $1.1 million in bonuses in a 27-month period to more than 1,146 employees who had been disciplined for failing to pay taxes, according to an inspector general's report. "This is outrageous," said Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas). "The IRS is essentially telling its employees: Break the law and we will reward you. " The employees were among more than 2,800 at the agency who received performance awards within one year of disciplinary action, such as suspensions or written reprimands for drug use, filing fraudulent time sheets or other misconduct, the report found.

Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World has been chosen the greatest moment in baseball history by The Sporting News and the second-greatest sports moment of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated. Now, the Wall Street Journal is calling it something else: perhaps the final illustration of 10 weeks of cheating by Leo Durocher's 1951 New York Giants. For 50 years, Thomson has been baseball's ideal clutch hero and Ralph Branca the game's most symbolic goat.

To the 96,000 residents of Compton, the little Cessna would have looked like scores of other small planes that flew over the city each day. But anyone paying close attention might have noticed the single-engine craft kept circling the city in a continuous loop. What they could not have known was that it packed unusual cargo - a bank of a dozen wide-angle industrial imaging cameras. They recorded low-resolution images of every corner of the 10.1-square-mile city. For nine days in early 2012, the small plane beamed the images to the local sheriff's department station, where deputies observed everything from fender benders, to a string of necklace snatchings to a shooting.

According to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Department of Homeland Security has defamed veterans of the U.S. armed forces by concluding in an internal memo that some returning service members might be susceptible to the propaganda of right-wing extremists. The Republicans' manufactured outrage says less about the deficiencies of the document -- which are real -- than about the desperation of the Obama administration's critics.

"Outrage," the latest offering from prolific Japanese filmmaker and actor Takeshi Kitano, marks his return to the pure, visceral gangster picture, so low-key and offhanded in its mastery that it becomes something like a pulp sleight-of-hand trick. Kitano plays a middle manager of sorts in the Japanese yakuza gangster underworld, destined never to rise to the heights of the true bosses even as promotions are constantly dangled before him. Against a complex web of deal-making, promises made and broken and alliances well above his paygrade, he finds himself simply fighting for survival.

A 4-month-old kitten is struggling to survive after being intentionally doused with gasoline and set on fire in Sacramento, authorities said. A $5,000 reward has been established to help catch those involved. “This was not an accident,” said Gina Knepp, manager of the Front Street shelter in Sacramento. “The vet who treated him … they had to bathe him because the smell of fuel was so strong.” The kitten was found in a South Sacramento neighborhood. Resident Hector Munoz was leaving for work when he discovered the kitten in his driveway and immediately took him for help.

WASHINGTON -- A group of 31 senators signed a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. Tuesday requesting the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the investigation into the source of a series of national security leaks that were eventually published by the New York Times . In a letter circulated by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the senators called the leaks "stunning" and said: "If there were ever a case requiring an outside special counsel with bipartisan acceptance and widespread public trust, this is it. " The scandal was prompted by two New York Times reports, which exposed U.S. cyber attacks against Iran and the White House's secret "kill list.

Concerned citizens have taken to blogs, Twitter and Facebook to post their concerns about the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager slain by a neighborhood watch captain in a Florida townhouse development. They have also, famously, posted them on their backs. The Trayvon Martin protest T-shirt has become a staple at rallies across the country, and it's difficult to think of another item of clothing more representative of the nation's twitchy zeitgeist in April 2012.

With international high finance the modern era's wild west, it's not surprising Costa-Gavras - a stalwart of the politically minded thriller ("Z," "Missing") - would try to mine banking malfeasance for cinematic suspense. But "Capital," about the machinations engineered by a newly anointed French bank president (Gad Elmaleh) to avoid a takeover from an aggressive American hedge fund mastermind (Gabriel Byrne), never quite gels as either a sharp critique of take-no-prisoners commerce or a voyeuristic wallow in corporate nastiness.

The Season 4 premiere of "Game of Thrones" claimed another victim Sunday night, but this time it wasn't a member of the Stark family or yet another bearded old guy whose name you can't quite remember -- it was HBO GO. For the second time in a month, the premium network's online streaming service crashed shortly after 9 p.m. EDT due to overwhelming traffic, some of which came from subscribers logging in remotely but was almost certainly boosted by...

"The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together … both pleasure and applicability to life. " These words of the Roman poet Horace remain encoded in our cultural DNA. Even after the artistic revolutions incited by the Romantics, the realists and the various rabble-rousing factions of the avant-garde, the expectation endures that art should instruct or entertain or, better still, do both at the same time. Horace hard-liners, a conservative crew who would rather be educated by artists than amused by them, would no doubt cast a disapproving eye on the Echo Theater Company's indecorous (though sensationally acted)

President Obama's appearance on the Funny or Die sketch series "Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis" on Tuesday has become a viral sensation, with over 14 million views already. But not everyone is laughing, especially Stephen Colbert. On Wednesday night's "The Colbert Report," Colbert rounded up those who had a real beef with the leader of the free world doing a comedy sketch to drum up registration on the Healthcare.gov website. Not surprisingly, those pundits mostly existed on Fox News and "later in the day on Fox News," according to Colbert.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's accusation that the CIA has illegally spied on Congress has caused everyone from South Carolina's hawkish Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham to on-the-run whistle-blower Edward Snowden to weigh in. Feinstein, a Democrat, chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. She claims there is evidence that the CIA conducted surveillance on committee staffers who were looking through classified documents related to the spy agency's interrogation and detention practices during the administration of President George W. Bush.

GOP gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari on Wednesday called Republican rival Tim Donnelly's comparison of President Obama to Hitler and Stalin “outrageous.” “Some people are so desperate for attention they're willing to say anything,” the former U.S Treasury official told reporters at a campaign stop in the San Joaquin Valley town of Delano. Donnelly, an Assemblyman from San Bernardino County who is also running for governor, suggested...

There's a war against Legos. I know what you're thinking: How could anyone have a beef with those colorful, plastic toy bricks with which you can build cities, stage your own Bible stories or reenact the Trojan War, the Civil War or Star Wars? And hasn't "The Lego Movie" been No. 1 at the box office for three straight weeks? But here's Lego's problem: The main market for the $4 billion company's traditional plastic bricks and mini-figures is boys. Certainly some girls enjoy making castles or skyscrapers out of the bricks, just like their brothers, but in 2011, Lego's market research boys found that 90% of Lego users were boys.

President Obama and his administration have made a complete shambles of the AIG bailout, and the failure won't be papered over by the chief executive's populist campaign rhetoric. To call it an "outrage" doesn't begin to describe the disgraced insurance giant's payment of $165 million in bonuses to securities traders in the very division whose dealings in so-called credit default swaps was at the root of Wall Street's current meltdown.

The editorial deplored the lack of "outrage" regarding the truly staggering deficits the Administration has incurred. It is an outrage that in times of peace we run such deficits. It is an outrage that in times of economic properity we run such deficits. It is an outrage that the Administration has used this device to lead the populace into a false sense of security. It is an outrage that no one seems to be outraged about this, that few voices call out. In the past decade the United States has evolved from the world's leading creditor nation to the world's leading debtor nation.

After a long legal battle, Penguin Books India has agreed to remove a book about Hinduism from circulation in India, and to destroy all copies of book in the country, a decision that drew immediate criticism from writers and literary groups around the world. The Hindu nationalist group Shiksha Bachao Andolan filed a civil suit against Penguin Books India in 2011, claiming that Wendy Doniger's “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” disparaged Hinduism and was guilty of “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” Doniger, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, said in a statement released by PEN Delhi that she lamented her publisher's decision to settle the suit with the group.

It's time for the California Interscholastic Federation and its member schools to have a philosophical debate on whether it should be easy or hard for athletes to switch high schools. So far, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of outrage in how schools are welcoming transfer students with open arms. Transfers in large numbers have been happening in Southern California for years, but a 2012 CIF statewide rule that reduced the penalty for transferring without moving from one year to one month has given parents the green light to move without worrying about consequences.